Category Archives: the black album

The news about a Canadian copy of Prince’s The Black Album, from 1987 and cancelled for release by The Artist and Warner Bros., selling on music marketplace Discogs.com for $27,500 did not escape our attention. As Noisey.com reports:

“This record-breaking copy of The Black Album isn’t the most expensive Black Album ever sold—a sealed copy went for $42,298 earlier this year—but it is special. It was salvaged from the vinyl slaughter by a pressing plant employee in Canada, who had no idea of its value until five sealed American copies of the album surfaced in 2016. The unnamed man then contacted Jeff Gold, a former executive VP at Warner who now runs a music memorabilia store.”

Indeed, the aforementioned Prince vinyl has always been a sought-after artifact in its original, unreleased state, and a hot item among vinyl and CD bootleggers, not to mention digital file swappers. (It’s readily available these days among file traders despite Prince and his estate’s efforts to the contrary.) No less than Blurt Editor Fred Mills reports, “A number of years ago, long before the record saw official release on CD, I had bought a vinyl bootleg of it, complete with solid black artwork and sticker title, at a record swap show. Ultimately, during a purge of my record collection – I had always thought of Black Album as more of a curiosity than a ‘real’ Prince album, what with so many throwaway tunes, and that Prince himself had made the right call in yanking it – a ‘friend of mine, whose name I forget’ sold that bootleg copy for in the neighborhood of $400. Gee, who was that? I must have been drunk when I loaned it to him/her… And that was just for a bootleg. i would venture a guess that $27k for an actual copy of the real deal, while excessive by my personal budget standards, is about right.”

Available at random download sites, depending on the state of Prince estate whack-a-mole efforts…

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